Fear not Argus, something truly marvelous is at hand (assuming of course the locals get their act together).

MRTA and Krung Thai Bank are pushing to get all the transit systems to accept contactless EMV as a payment vehicle. This means that you will be able to use your PayWave (Visa) or PayPass (MasterCard) contactless card to pay directly at the gates, no need for stored value or single ride tickets. They also intend doing a stored value card using the same infrastructure (not sure if that's practical, we already have multiple solutions).

London has had this for some years, KLIA Ekspress also, and it's piloting in Singapore now ready to go live in September, Dubai, New York and Boston are also setting up systems.

There is a catch (isn't there always) in that MRTA want to do it on the cheap keep the costs down and their current proposed architecture has been rejected by all the major operators as being too costly to run.

Annoyingly, years back, just when we were getting started on Mangmoom, I (and others) suggested this is the way to go. Unfortunately contactless was only just starting in Thailand (it's still not massive, I've only seen terminals in Tesco) and the powers that be decided it was "too soon". Now some years and $x million later we're going to do it.

By the way, all this is not betraying any confidences, all information is available (in Thai of course and not on the front pages) on the MRTA, OTP and KTB websites. PM me if you want links, I will warn you that it's CTAC committee meeting minutes, heavy going and Google translate is useless.

I expect some form of press-release soon, of course it will have stupid timescales (way too short).